Maybe I’m just preoccupied as I face my impending cholesterol test. I’m going to try and get it done this morning. Besides the Tour de Egg Sandwich this past Saturday, I’ve been pretty darn good this week. Plus, if I get my blood work done now, I don’t have to think about it during the Super Bowl.

As it turns out, the Super Bowl will fall in the sweet spot between my blood work and my appointment to discuss it with my doctor. It’s like a hall pass for the week.

What does this mean for the big game?

I take the Super Bowl very seriously. It’s the one day a year that I attempt to do something manly. That is it. Just this one thing. Unless you count mowing the lawn, which I don’t, because for years that was the purview of teenage boys.

Part of my traditional celebration has been eating traditional foods, like delivery pizza & wings, bags of chips and copious amounts of mass-market beer.

But not this year.

There is a little something I’ve been sitting on for a special occasion, and that’s my pack of duck, foie gras and sauternes sausages. When I saw these at Adventure in Food a while back, I recalled something similar topped with caramelized onions that Raf and I ate at an event in San Francisco.

It was the same night Raf discovered vanilla ice cream with cocoa nibs.

However, since I have no plans of sharing these sausages with my kids, and I can’t imagine that Mrs. Fussy would want to give them a go, the feast of manly delights seems like a perfect fit. Okay, well maybe they aren’t so manly. But in a week, I suspect they will be out of my diet entirely.

So much for eating like the everyman. As long as I’m throwing convention out the window, I’ll also plan to drink some exceptional beer too. I have a few bottles of Founder’s Brewery Red’s Rye PA and while that has absolutely nothing to do with either team, it’s a delicious thing to drink.

Perhaps I will save them for the first quarter when I can still adequately appreciate their zesty grapefruit bouquet. Or maybe even before the kickoff as an aperitif. That’s manly, right?

Still, there will have to be something to drench in Buffalo sauce. It’s not a Super Bowl without Buffalo sauce. I do have a wee bit of duck fat remaining. If I could get some good local potatoes, I could roast ’em and crisp ’em up in the duck fat before drowning them in the buffalo sauce.

Oh baby.

The challenge will be managing all this and watching the game at the same time. I’d try and rope Mrs. Fussy into helping. But I can’t imagine she could in good faith be complicit in any of these shenanigans. We’ll see. I’ll keep you posted. Enjoy the game.

Go Giants.

Many years ago, I was visiting my friend S in Los Angeles, and she thought it would be a good idea to make some gumbo. She wanted me to do it, even though I had never made gumbo before. So I went through her cookbooks, got a broad sense about the dish, and then put a gumbo together that used what I thought were the best parts of each recipe. In the end, it turned into something delicious.

Sometimes I follow recipes fastidiously. Other times I cook fast and loose. Well, maybe not so fast. One of these days I’ll get my speed up. The critical piece of that is improving my knife skills.

Red beans and rice is the classic New Orleans dish that I never make exactly the same way twice. It was a staple of our diet last winter, and having not written down the process, I was afraid I had forgotten how to make it. Yesterday, I figured it out again and it came out well. So today I’m transcribing the process, as much for me as for you.

Like most of my hearty winter bean dishes, it starts with two pounds of dried beans.

The techniques for this dish are nothing new. If you have read the earlier post on building flavor, this is really just exemplifies how that process plays out in a classic dish.

Dried beans get picked over, rinsed and soaked in cold water over night.
When you are ready to begin, it’s time to dump and rinse the beans.
Then refill the pot with water, put the plump beans in, and bring the pot to a simmer.
The goal here isn’t to make the beans soft, but to get them on their way.

In another pan, it’s time to start building some flavor.
Brown several 5mm tall disks of andouille sausage on medium low heat.
This will also render out some delicious fat.

As the two pots are on the flame, it’s time to prep the vegetables.
Finely chop up a couple of onions. One if it’s mega large. More if they are puny.
Do the same to a healthy-looking organic green bell pepper.
Ditto with two to three ribs of organic celery.
And put all the veg aside in a bowl.

If you have time, very finely chop a clove or two of garlic and set that aside elsewhere.

Pull the meat from the pan, and set it aside. Keep the fat in the pan. In fact, add some more fat, a lot more, to sauté and soften all those vegetables (except garlic). I like to use expeller pressed organic canola oil.

While these classic New Orleans aromatics are cooking down, and after you have scraped up the brown sausage bits from the bottom of the pan, it’s time to make a spice blend. Here is where the process gets really loose and squishy.

I have no idea what goes into red beans and rice, so I use my Penzey’s Cajun Seasoning spice blend as a guide. I scroll through the list of ingredients, and dump the relevant ones into a bowl, with quantities based on the position on the list.

Here’s how it works:

Sweet paprika – Yes – A ton of it, at least a quarter cup.
Salt – No – The ham is salty and I’ll correct for salt at the end.
Celery – No – I’ve got the real thing in the other pan.
Sugar – No – I hear it can toughen beans.
Garlic – No – I’ll be using the fresh stuff in a moment.
Black pepper –  Yes – Many many turns on the grinder, until I tire of the task.
Onion – No – I can smell all the onion cooking. No need for more.
Oregano – Yes – Maybe about a Tablespoon or more.
Cayenne red pepper – Yes – But I’m cooking for kids, so just a few shakes.
Caraway – No – Don’t keep it in the house.
Dill – No – Ditto.
Turmeric – Yes – A scant tablespoon to help give the dish its proper color.
Cumin – Yes – Fresh ground, actually. At least a teaspoon or so.
Basil – No – I’m not crazy about it in long cooked dishes.
Bay Leaf – Yes – In fact, how about two.
Mace & Cardamom – No – But I briefly thought about substituting ginger and nutmeg.
Marjoram – Yes – A scant teaspoon, maybe a bit more to compensate for the basil.
Rosemary – Yes – A large pinch of the dried stuff goes into the spice grinder with the cumin.
Thyme – Yes – A sizable pinch.

And now I’ve got the spice blend. Besides all the chopping, this takes the most active time. Because from here on out, the tasks come fast and furious.

Drain the softened beans in a colander.
Finish the vegetables with garlic.
Dump the spices (minus the bay leaves) into the aromatics and cook out their rawness.
Then dump the softer, but still firm, beans and stir them into the spicy aromatics.

Marcella Hazan would call this insaporire although I can only assume there is a French name for a similar technique as well.

Anyhow, from there, you put the sausage back in the pot, in addition to a chunk of tasso ham, if you have one. Cover the whole thing with cold water, bring to a boil and then down to the slowest simmer, until the beans are tender and the flavors are melded. At least an hour. It’s a delicate balance because you don’t want all the beans to split, mostly for aesthetics. If they split it’s fine, next time you can adjust.

The broth of the beans may be a little thin, and that’s where gumbo filé comes in. A rounded teaspoon of that at the very end will thicken up the pot nicely. Don’t forget before serving to pull out the ham, chop it up, and mix it back into the beans. Scoop this into a bowl with plenty of rice, and if you’re lucky you’ve got a very satisfying meal.

Still, it was my decision to assemble a group of intrepid eaters at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning in order to eat an unholy number of egg and cheese sandwiches.

Had it not been for the untenable hour, I suspect more people would have shown up for the Tour de Egg Sandwich. But as it was, we had twenty people on the tour, of which eighteen submitted completed score sheets. Some were first timers, and it was great to meet all of you, but most had some previous experience traipsing around the region with me sampling one of the area’s culinary delights.

By the end of the morning, we had been to four fine establishments, plus one Stewart’s, and ate an egg and cheese sandwich on a hard roll at each. Here is what we learned.

We began the day at Jack’s Diner in Albany. I had been there in its previous incarnation and subsequently after the ownership change and renovation. It has a great classic diner look and feel, but the menu has been updated with more modern prices. Generally, I have a strong aversion to paying higher prices for everyday food. But the tour isn’t primarily about value, it’s about sussing out the best versions of a form.

And for the plurality of participants the best version of the egg and cheese sandwich was found at Jack’s Diner. Was it perfect? No. But it scored consistently high points from its fans regardless of whether they ordered American or Cheddar cheese. Those who ordered sausage on their egg sandwiches called Jack’s links the best of the day.

You can read a full and lurid description of the winning sandwich on All Over Albany, complete with pictures. But if you want the executive summary, Jack’s serves a large, lightly grilled roll, with two gently cooked fried eggs that are tender and more over-medium than over-hard. A generous amount of cheese is strategically placed between the two hot eggs, so that it melts into a perfect, greasy cheesy sauce that really ties the sandwich together.

The downside is that it will set you back $3.99 without meat and $4.99 with bacon or sausage, making it the most expensive sandwich of the tour by far. But you do get to eat at an actual table, served by an actual waitress, and enjoy your food off an actual plate.

From Jack’s we went onto McCarroll’s in Delmar which came in a very close second.

McCarroll’s is amazing. On a Saturday morning the deli counter is like an egg and cheese sandwich factory. Every square inch of the griddle is filled with frying eggs, sizzling meat and grilling buns.

If you believe an egg sandwich is all about the roll, then this is the place for you, because this roll got the highest score on the tour. It’s slathered with butter and toasted on the griddle to a crisp and deep golden brown. This deli also got the highest score for bacon among those who were enjoying the most popular meat choice on their sandwiches.

So why did it not win? Two reasons. First, the high heat from the griddle that did such a good job toasting the buns, also significantly browned the eggs. I found them to be overcooked, but others like them this way. Second, the toasted bun was so good and deeply flavorful that it threw everything else out of balance. Whereas the Jack’s sandwich let the egg and cheese be the star, here the buttery eggs took a back seat to the roll.

Still, at $2.69 for an egg and cheese and $3.19 for one with meat, it’s an incredible value for a delicious sandwich and well worth a stop when you are in the neighborhood. It comes wrapped in foil which makes it portable for eating on the go, or you could sit and eat it at one of the tables set up in the market (if you can find an empty one).

Less amazing is Stewart’s. Well, maybe it is amazing that they sell so many of their eggwiches considering how substandard they are. It’s not like they are insanely cheap either. At $2.79 they are more than the egg and cheese at McCarroll’s. But it’s also the same price with meat. Although, as we would later find, you can still get an egg sandwich with meat at Famous Lunch for less money than the one at Stewarts.

But if a bland, gummy, steamed roll, with a grainy scrambled egg puck, topped with a token amount of “weird cheese” doesn’t sound appealing, don’t worry, you are not alone. This was the only universally reviled sandwich of the day. Well, all except for the dog, who really made out like a bandit here on everyone’s half-eaten eggwiches.

The upside is that I finally got to see and eat the infamous circle bacon. I just wish it hadn’t fused onto the bottom roll, so I could taste it in all of its glory. But to its credit, the bacon was intensely smoky and its aroma couldn’t help but improve the otherwise dreadful experience.

It was a pleasure to put that behind and move onto a bakery that makes its own rolls and prepares the sandwiches to order: Bella Napoli.

Here, more than anyplace else, the notion of a “hard roll” was challenged. None of the rolls were truly hard by any stretch of the imagination. But these were beyond soft. The rich, golden roll left oily marks where it came in contact with the paper plate. Not to say that was a bad thing. The roll had this way of coalescing around the egg and cheese to enrobe it in a rich doughy mass.

While Bella Napoli got solid scores all around, besides the bun there was nothing that really stood out as exceptional. It was the second favorite sandwich of many, the first choice of none. Perhaps its critical flaw was the placement of the cheese. They sat one slice on top of the two fried eggs, and as a result it didn’t entirely melt. Although there was one participant who preferred this less gooey approach to cheese.

These were a great value at $2.30 without meat and $3.30 with the added fat and protein.

Our final stop was Famous Lunch. Despite the name, they are open for breakfast too and serve it all day long. Like everything else at Famous their egg sandwiches are crazy cheap. How cheap? Try $1.75 for an egg and cheese and $2.50 for one that includes meat. By far, these were deemed the best value of the tour.

Famous Lunch had a very strong showing with a close third place finish behind McCarroll’s and only a hair’s breadth away from Jack’s. One can imagine that this was what the egg sandwich was always meant to be. One fried egg, with one slice of cheese on a simple grilled poppy seed hard roll. It’s cheap, it’s greasy, and it’s delicious. But it is also small and well proportioned so that everything works together.

Its detractors found it to be just a bit too sloppy, with its egg yolk splattered and scattered throughout the whites. Others noticed that while the yolks were cooked the whites hadn’t fully set. Cheddar cheese lovers were dismayed to not find their preferred cheese at this venerable institution. And a few found the American cheese to be bland.

You know what nobody tried? An egg and cheese with their zippy sauce. Next time.

Thank you to JessJamesJake who had the idea of a Tour de Egg Sandwich. Thank you again to StanfordSteph who had the idea of doing tours in the first place. And thank you to everyone who woke up early on a Saturday to participate in this crazy event.

If you weren’t able to make this one, don’t fret. Spring will be here soon, and with it another tour. I’m thinking Tour de Ice Cream. Mind you, this is different from a Tour de Soft Serve, but also a bit more challenging. I’ll need to wrap my head around it, and will keep you posted.

I’m sorry. You’re right. It’s bad form.

But won’t it be exciting later today when the victor of the Tour de Egg Sandwich is announced on All Over Albany? The Eat This! feature generally is posted sometime between noon and 2 p.m. Just so you know, the results were incredibly close. It was almost a three-way tie for first place.

In the meantime, hopefully I can distract you with tales of my favorite chocolate maker. After all, tomorrow is the first day of February and that means two things.
1) The day to download the membership forms for the Roxbury Farm CSA is less than 24 hours away.
2) Valentines Day is two weeks away.

So apropos of the default VD present, here is the big question. Where can you get an amazing box of chocolates?

The first time I was ever exposed to L.A. Burdick chocolates was at their café in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s a very special place—a chocolate café. You go into a cozy room to sit and linger over a small plate of precious chocolates.

Descriptions of the individual bonbons were printed in a fanciful script that was hard to read, so the apron-clad woman behind the counter was my guide as I selected a few pieces for the plate. She removed each handmade chocolate with loving care with what appeared to be antique silver serving pieces. In some ways it felt as much like a jewelery store as it did a chocolatier’s shop.

I could do without the ceremony of it all. Which is good because they have an online store that is completely (well, mostly) pretense-free and ships around the country. So wherever you are, you can get these amazing chocolates delivered.

Far too often chocolates are grotesquely large, with thick shells surrounding some brightly colored or cloyingly sweet or greasy interior.

L.A. Burdick is all about the chocolate. Sure, they produce interesting flavors of bonbons that you can see here. But their raspberry isn’t raspberry, it’s chocolate. And their coconut isn’t coconut, it too is chocolate. Say what?

Well, the interior of the vast majority of their chocolates is a dark chocolate ganache that is delicately infused with flavors to enhance the taste of the chocolate. It’s amazing. Yes, sometimes the flavors are so subtle that you may be left wondering if what you just ate was cardamom or ginger. But there is no doubt that whatever it was was delicious.

Perhaps my favorite part is how delicate and small they are. Each one could easily be swallowed in one large bite. But given their diminutive size, I generally nibble them tenderly, and savor every morsel.

Very few other bonbons can match the delicate and thin couverature used at L.A. Burdick either. This is also known as the firm outer layer of chocolate on a bonbon. There is a pleasing textural aspect to how it snaps and splits against the rich and silky chocolate interior. In fact, this point alone is my major complaint about most other chocolates. How I wish our local Chocolate Gecko would use a thinner couverature.

These are all handmade to boot, using real butter and cream, and all kinds of other good stuff.

There are two downsides however. One, chocolates this good are not inexpensive (and that’s not even counting the shipping fees). Two, they don’t have a long shelf life, so when they arrive, you’ve got to eat them in short order.

That last bit is actually a blessing in disguise, at least for me. I’m a bit of a hoarder. And I would gladly keep my special box of delicious chocolates near my pillow for a month, only taking small nibbles periodically. Unfortunately when you do this, one day you come to your stash to find it’s dried out, expired, moldy or otherwise unfit to eat. And then the guilt sets in.

Chocolates with a relatively short “Eat by” window are a blessing in disguise. And hopefully it will prevent you from overordering. But if you’ve never had these, now is the time to give them a try. And if you really cannot abide the shipping charge, the global headquarters is only about two and a half hours from Albany in Walpole, New Hampshire of all places.

I know. It’s a little unexpected. One doesn’t imagine that a small town in New Hampshire could be competitive with some of the best chocolatiers of Paris and New York City. But if it makes you feel any better about the company, they recently opened a retail location in Manhattan and are going head to head with the chocolate giants. For what it’s worth, I totally put these guys head and shoulders over Jacque Torres.

Surely there are plenty of people who would like to change the annual Times Union Best of the Capital Region poll. I imagine that many of them are lobbying to include a category that serves their personal self-interest. Given the tenacious, entrepreneurial, and competitive nature of our local cupcake bakers, they must be calling weekly to try and find a way onto the ballot.

Let me begin by saying that I have no horse in this race.

My family moved to the region over four years ago from Berkeley, California. The transition was not easy. But over the years, I have diligently sought out magnificent and wonderful places that make the Capital Region truly special: fantastic restaurants that one would not expect to find in a region outside the top 50 DMAs and unique offerings that cannot be found anywhere else.

And every year when the Best of the Capital Region poll is released, I’m crestfallen to see none of these places even get mentioned. To dismiss this poll as a popularity contest is doing the paper and the community a great disservice. What could be a source of great regional pride has recently only served to reinforce the stereotypes of Albany as a backwater of civilized society.

Furthermore, these feelings are not mine alone. Others have noticed and are similarly discouraged.

To be sure, improving the results will take time. But the first step is fixing the questionnaire. I have three specific suggestions that will help to move the poll in the right direction.

1) Individual Locations

There are many people who have suggested that chains have no place on the Best of the Capital Region results. I’m not entirely convinced of that, especially since in many cases the local outposts are owned and operated by members of our community.

However, as consistent as any chain may try to be, there are variations between locations. This is certainly true for the Best local grocery store category. It’s really impossible for most people to take a holistic view of a chain grocer in the region, given its relatively large footprint. Votes become more like guesses based on a reader’s personal experience.

Not only would it be more accurate, but it would also be more useful and interesting to ask people what is the best individual local grocery store. It would give The Fresh Market a chance to take the first place in the category, and it could wake people up to the splendor that is the Slingerland’s Price Chopper or their store on Central and New Karner. Hannaford could take it with their Latham store. It’s anyone’s ballgame.

This logic should hold true for EVERY CATEGORY. Best individual drug store/pharmacy, best individual pizza place, etcetera.

Will it be harder for our larger local chains to win than in years past? Sure. But it will also make it harder for places like Pizza Hut, whose mere presence on the list of Best pizza is insulting for a region where the standard for pizza is higher than most of the country. It should also give a better chance to smaller places that make truly amazing pizza, like DeFazio’s and Pizza King.

2) The Categories Themselves

When this survey started 15 years ago, I understand that the Capital Region was a very different place. Perhaps there weren’t a lot of ethnic restaurants and it made a lot of sense to try and group them by their geographic region.

But categories like Best Chinese/Japanese/Korean restaurant and Best Indonesian/Thai/Vietnamese restaurant have to go. As one of my readers succinctly put it, “They are embarrassing and make us look like hillbillies standing next to the outhouse with a straw between our teeth.”

We have a glut of sushi and teppanyaki restaurants, which could easily fall in two category, but at the very least need to be extracted from Chinese and Korean cuisines. We have plenty of restaurants that offer exclusively Chinese food, which should absolutely have its own category. Yes, there are still some places that offer a little bit of both. For those I would suggest an umbrella Best Pan Asian for beloved institutions like Ichiban, which continue to serve both Chinese and Japanese cuisine.

Another ethnocentric question on the poll asks readers to vote on the best ethnic market. All the responses are Italian. We have an amazing variety of South Asian, East Asian, African, and Latin markets in the region. This may need to be broken up into two categories as well: Best Italian market and Best ethnic market.

Then there are the things that are unique to our region that are completely missing from this list. We are in the heart of apple country, and there is no question about Best apple orchard? The Capital Region also has a unique style of hot dog, the three-inch wiener with the works, and a Best mini-hot dog with meat sauce category would help to draw attention to this regional specialty. The same holds true for Best fish-fry sandwich.

At the end of this letter I’ve attached a list of categories that has been revised to reflect the above.

3) Best versus Favorite

There is a fine line between the things someone might like the most (aka their favorite) and what they know achieves a higher standard (aka the best).

For example, my favorite local bakery is Crisan. I love them because they are committed to using high quality ingredients, it’s conveniently located, they accommodate last minute orders, their baking skills are excellent, they offer a great product at an outstanding value, and I enjoy chatting with the staff. Crisan may make the best pastry in Albany, but it is not the best bakery in the area.

That is Mrs. London’s. Their croissants are the best I’ve had anywhere, and they also bake some killer bread. Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, it’s out of the way. Sure, it’s a little precious inside. But it’s the best.

I believe that your readers can make these distinctions themselves if they are reminded at the beginning of the poll that the Times Union isn’t looking for their favorites, but rather their thoughts on which individual location is truly the best. It may not be the place they go every day. Likely it is not. It may be the place where one goes for special occasions.  The best place may even be the one that is just a little bit better than your favorite spot, it’s just a bit off the beaten path.

In some ways, this last bit is a matter of semantics. In other ways it’s the one thing that gets to the heart of the issue. Very few people would say that Subway makes the best sandwiches if they sat down and thought about the difference between The Best and their favorite. Subway may have the best value, it may have the best speed of service, or it might be the most convenient. But I refuse to believe that a plurality of your readers cannot recognize there are better sandwiches in the area.

As you retool the Best of the Capital Region ballot for 2012, please consider the above suggestions. I look forward to the day when the picture painted by the major Albany newspaper matches the Albany I’ve come to know and love, and getting this ballot right is the first step in that direction.

Sincerely,
Daniel Berman
and the undersigned
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Note: That means if you agree, please say so in the comments below.
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I’ll tell you this right now, Stewart’s did not win.

The full results will be up later this week, I promise. But for right now, I can’t even think of eggs, which makes the Sunday breakfast post a bit challenging. Instead, let’s turn our thoughts over to breakfast meat.

Glen over at Rolf’s eats a steak every morning for breakfast. God bless him. I wish I had his genes. Steak is a lot more common breakfast meat than say, smoked pork chops. And while Taylor ham may be common in New Jersey and scrapple is widely available in Pennsylvania, these options rarely make it this far north. In case you were wondering, I consider corned beef hash in a separate category all by itself.

No, most of the country has to choose from the holy trinity of pork: Bacon, ham or sausage. One of these is clearly superior to the other two. And while you can probably guess which one, my reason may surprise you.

Obviously it’s bacon.

Now before you start flying off the handle, bacon is not always the best choice. If you find yourself in the south and there is a fine country ham on the breakfast menu, it would clearly take the prize.

But breakfast ham can be bad. Some hams are injected with water and heavily processed to the point of producing a salty and smoky sponge. I like my ham to resemble an actual pig’s leg. I like to be able to see the individual muscles, and the layers of fat and connective tissue that divide them. This helps to give me the confidence that I’m eating food and not science.

Sausage too can be amazing. Some restaurants pride themselves on grinding their own sausage by hand. Others, like Dan’s Place Two, may not make their own, but excel at cooking the stuff.

Still, if you don’t know where it comes from, sausage can be pretty scary stuff. Meat requires a certain amount of trust in the first place. Ground meat requires a lot more, because once it’s all ground up and highly seasoned, almost anything could be in there. I’ve been served unappetizingly thin industrially produced sausage patties and factory-made tightly packed links that had virtually no flavor on their own. It’s actually sad that animals had to die to make these horrid foodstuffs.

Bacon, on the other hand, is different.

Bacon always comes from the same part of the pig, its deliciously fatty belly (well belly bacon does anyway). And you can see with your own eyes the red and white streaks of meat and fat, which show the meat has not been adulterated. Plus you are guaranteed that your meat came from no more animals than the number of bacon strips on our plate. A sausage on the other hand could be made from hundreds or even thousands of carcasses.

Plus the downside to bacon is minimal. Ordering it crispy insures against it being undercooked. One needs to trust that doing so will not result in the cook burning your meat, because crispy is not the same thing as charred.

It’s also a good bit less food than the other options. It’s more like a meat cracker than a big old hunk of protein. You know, those crackers that are cooked in their own fat.

Most of the time, I skip meat at breakfast. However, if I’m going to indulge, especially at a place where the provenance of the sausage is an unknown entity, I’m going for bacon. And not because it’s trendy, because it’s not. Bacon is totally played out. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t occasionally order it.

My intentions for the FLB have been to keep it separate from restaurant reviews. Those are mostly reserved for Yelp. In a few days I hope to post a review there on the food I ate at MezzaNotte last night. Instead today, I’m going to focus on one larger issue about restaurants that was inspired by my meal.

Overall, I was pleased with the experience. It was a decent value at half the restaurant’s normal prices. But in many ways the food was lacking. Still, I was impressed with the entrée. The chef had the guts to go without a vegetable on the plate, and the confidence to be simple with clean bright flavors. In this town, that’s really notable.

However, the fish along with most everything else I was served, was under seasoned. Fortunately, there was a shaker of salt on the table. But this turns out to be a double-edged sword. Does a shaker of salt belong on the table at a restaurant of this stature? You know, one with white linens where the plurality of entrées cost $24.

The argument against the shaker is that food should come out of the kitchen perfectly seasoned. There should be no need for adjustments made at the table. From a cooking perspective, salt works better in the kitchen than at the table. As food is cooking, this critical seasoning helps to bring the flavors together and create a savory undercurrent to a dish. Sprinkling the stuff on top of food that’s already cooked is a Hail Mary to try and perk up something bland.

Thus, saltshakers are not routinely found on the table at many of the world’s top restaurants.

It should be noted that I don’t particularly have a salt-tooth, or a sweet-tooth for that matter. Mine is more of a fat-tooth. And I almost never reach for the salt at a restaurant. If anything, most restaurants tend to use generous amounts of the stuff in their cooking. Some like Capital City Gastropub occasionally go too far and cross the line from savory into salty.

At MezzaNotte the gnocchi absolutely required salt. It was billed as, “Chestnut and winter squash gnocchi in a buttery sage sauce”. I did not ask for more details on the dish, and simply assumed it was the gnocchi that were made from chestnuts and squash (in addition to potato). But in reality, it was potato-ricotta gnocchi in a sweet squash and sage butter sauce with chestnut pieces and shallots.

It was sweet. Not sweet as in awesome or cool, but sweet as in sugary. And despite having additional grating of Parmesan, the dish needed salt to bring it into balance. The upside is that once the gnocchi were salted, they were pretty light, and tasty.

Now, had the saltshaker not been on the table, I would have needed to ask for it. If this had been a restaurant that prides itself on producing perfectly seasoned food, then this action of requesting salt might have raised a red flag. It may have also initiated one of those awkward but sometimes-helpful conversations between the restaurant and a displeased customer.

In this case I was glad that the salt was on the table, because I really didn’t feel like having that conversation. Especially since for the price, the food was fine. Had I been paying retail for the gnocchi, it may have played out differently.

Still, I have a problem with a shaker of salt that lives on every table in a nice restaurant. It seems to me an implied commitment to under seasoning the food. Either that or it’s an indictment of a restaurant’s patrons, assuming they will only be happy if they can over season their food with salt.

Diners and casual places are different. I don’t expect them to operate at the same level. But part of expert preparation that justifies high-end restaurant prices is producing food that is well seasoned. When it comes to the table it should require nothing. Not fresh cracked pepper, not grated cheese, and certainly not salt.

Thanks for hearing me out. I feel a bit better now.

Screw local food. You know what I just ate? A tangerine. In upstate New York. At the end of January.
And I loved it.

You know what else I love? Coffee. That doesn’t grow here. Neither does chocolate. Nor the olives for my olive oil. For the past month we’ve eaten more rice than I ever thought imaginable, and I don’t know if it’s even possible to cultivate the grain in New York. If Little Miss Fussy had to give up her mango lassi habit, I fear she wouldn’t have the will to get out of bed for a month.

Sure, if one were enterprising, I imagine there is a way of producing a local salt. But pepper is out of the question. We have great local cheeses, but none of them is Parmigiano-Reggiano. If necessary, I could be content with local wine, beer and spirits. However I’m not giving up on the amazing variety of foodstuffs that, while they may come from far away, help to create a global village.

Now that you know I’m no ideologue, I have to tell you something about local food.

Some of it is amazing. There are some who will have you believe that local food is better just because it is grown by your friends and neighbors. That’s a really loose interpretation of better if you ask me. Perhaps you could make an argument that it’s better for the environment without all the added transportation costs, or better for the community since the money supports local business.

These are fine reasons to buy local foods. But they are not why I do it. I buy local foods because they taste better. Now that is a tenuous argument too, because not all locally grown foods taste better than those raised elsewhere. Think about milk. We have large industrialized milk facilities locally, which are just like those used all over the country to produce a consistent product state to state. Pretty much all milk that isn’t ultra-pasteurized is local as a matter of logistical necessity.

Let me say that again. Milk does not taste better because it’s local.

The local milk that does taste better does so not because it’s local. No, the good local milk is delicious because of the production practices used by a small operator who cares deeply about the product.

Some local fruits and vegetables taste better because they can be bred for flavor and not shelf life or transportation durability. Also, because they have less distance to travel, they can be picked later, closer to their peak ripeness, without as much risk of damage in transit. This short time from field-to-market is also critical for things like corn, where every day after it’s been picked sugar converts into starch.

Personally, I find that eating local gives me a much better sense and appreciation for the region and the natural cycles of the season. I know it’s spring, when the fiddleheads and ramps arrive. Summer officially starts before the first tomatoes come in, but it wouldn’t be summer for me without a no-cook panzanella of farm fresh tomatoes, cucumbers and red peppers.

I mention all of this now, because local farms are gearing up to prepare for the planting season. And that means those who operate under a Community Supported Agriculture model are starting to line up subscribers.

For the last two years, I have been a member of the Roxbury CSA. Last year was brutal. The year before was magnificent. So it goes. But even in the bad year, when hail ruined crops before the first harvest and the farm was decimated by two major floods, I still loved it.

Don’t be like me. I blew my chance at a Roxbury membership my first two years in the region. There aren’t many openings and they fill up quickly. That’s why I’m writing you now.

Open registration begins on Wednesday, February 1. That’s six days away. On that date, the forms and lists of open slots will be available on Roxbury’s website. Mark your calendars now. Plan to get online, and write a big check. You’ll need an envelope and a stamp too.

Then you’ll just have to cross your fingers and hope for great growing conditions.

And don’t worry. If you cannot get into the Roxbury CSA there are plenty of other local farms that run CSAs too. We are very lucky here in the Capital Region to have so many local farms that do good work. But I can tell you this now, when my local tomatoes come in, I’m dressing them with extra virgin olive oil and aged sherry vinegar from Spain.

Yes, it’s Souper Sunday.

Sorry. The Schenectady Greenmarket has too much class to enlist such a cheap pun to promote their event this upcoming weekend. Instead, they are calling it their 3^rd annual Market Cook-off. Last year’s theme was Spuds Are Not Duds. This year the theme is Soup!

I wouldn’t be doing this had it not been for Wendalicious who recommended me for the job. Thank you. Judging is one of the things I enjoy most. Seriously. But I’m also excited about this particular showdown for a few other reasons.

Eating seasonally in the summer is easy. The winter can be a bit more tricky. And frankly I’m surprised by how many people struggle with finding tasty things to do with potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, sweet potatoes, winter squash, apples, dried beans, cornmeal, other dried grains, cured meats, eggs, cheese, and other dairy (just to name a few).

Winter foods may need a bit more coaxing to transform it from its hard inedible form into something soft and soothing. But simmer them in a soup pot or roast them in the oven, and not only will they warm your house, but they will fill the air with deliciousness.

So seeing what the chefs make should be interesting, and hopefully inspiring.

It’s not a large event. There are only two or three chefs participating as a result of space limitations. At this moment I’m not entirely clear on the details, except that I’m to show up at the market on Sunday for the judging. Honestly, I would likely have been there anyway to pick up eggs, honey and some vegetables.

One of the chefs whom I expect will be participating is Chris Euripidou from the Farmer Boy Diner on Central Avenue. This seemed like a curious contender, a diner cook competing in a farmers market cook-off. But then I found out, he’s not just any cook. Chef Euripidou graduated summa cum laude from Johnson & Wales.

That’s a big deal. I had no idea. Now I’m looking forward to having a chance to meet him, and learning about how he came to be behind the stove at a diner on the edge of Colonie.

If you come to the market on Sunday, not only can you see me and get the unofficial rundown of the Tour de Egg Sandwich, but you can also get samples of the soups that are being made for the showdown. The judging itself happens between 12 and 12:30, so if you come, I hope you can stick around for the results. And besides the draw of the soup contest, they do have great eggs, honey, milk, pickles, pastry, breads, wine, produce, coffee, tea, prepared foods, kids activities, music and more.

If you’ve never been, the Schenectady Greenmarket is held in the Proctor’s lobby during the winter. Free parking is always available in the covered parking garage behind the Villa Italia bakery.

Anyhow, I wanted to make sure you marked your calendars, because Sunday isn’t that far away. If you cannot make it, I’m sure I’ll have a recap of the event next week. Although that’s a busy week too with another Super Bowl Sunday at its close.

The fun just never stops.

But eventually most kids go to school, and there they are exposed to a whole wide world of possibilities. Many of these include some truly awful foods.

I was amazed that Young Master Fussy came back from school singing a song whose only lyrics were fast food restaurant names and being told to buy Sunny-D by his teacher so that the library could earn free books. But those were a lot easier to combat than the newfound desire for the brightly colored foods he saw his classmates enjoying in the cafeteria and at snack time.

So what’s a dad to do? Well, believe it or not, I compromised. A little. There are two snack foods that have made it into a regular rotation. And while they aren’t great, neither makes me feel too uneasy. One happens to be truly surprising.

The kiddo was actually introduced to Smartfood popcorn in class. Unbeknownst to me, his teachers handed it out one day when the students were watching a movie.

I have a few complaints with popcorn:
1)    It’s so damn easy to make at home that buying it in bags seems wrong.
2)    The vast majority of corn is genetically modified, and I’m not into that.
3)    Often it can be made with solvent-extracted oils, and I don’t like that either.

Those things aside, Smartfood isn’t really all that bad. It’s corn, oil, cheddar cheese, whey, buttermilk and salt. It can be bought in 100-calorie pouches, so one isn’t compelled to eat through an entire bag once it’s opened.

Besides the concerns about the corn itself and the oil used to pop it, Smartfood is actually a pretty wholesome snack. I suppose I could stretch and feign concern about the cheese and buttermilk coming from industrially produced dairy cows that are treated with artificial growth hormones and antibiotics. And sure that’s a problem. But there is so little dairy involved that it’s hard even for me to get worked up about.

The second snack is probably a bit more unexpected. Perhaps you have seen it on your grocer’s shelf and laughed off the bizarre juxtaposition of terms: Natural Cheetos.

If you have never stopped to pick up the bag and check it out more carefully, let me blow your mind. The cynic in me assumed this was some kind of marketing ploy. After all, the word “Natural” is completely meaningless when it comes to food labels. And just because the package is printed with a pastoral wood-cutting motif in warm earth tones, doesn’t mean the product in the bag is any less processed than any other puff bearing Chester the Cheetah’s ugly mug.

But I was wrong.

The first two ingredients:
1) Organic corn meal (aka GMO-free)
2) Expeller-pressed sunflower oil (aka solvent-free & unlikely GMO)

Wow. Color me impressed. They also are made with organic sour cream, which means the cows were not treated with artificial growth hormones or antibiotics. Honestly, I was shocked when I first learned this.

Now granted, this is a highly processed food that contains natural flavors, and I’m not crazy about that.  But I have to tell you, that if Young Master Fussy is going to be eating something made by Frito-Lay, these are at the top of my list.

Naturally then, he prefers the Smartfood. But I’m hoping to break him from that with a few more amazing batches of homemade popcorn. Finding the right cheese topping is going to be a challenge. The microplane of Parm-Reg isn’t going to do it for Young Master Fussy. I may need to bite the bullet and buy the best cheddar powder I can find.

I’ll keep you posted.